Artist Statement

Kiyomi Taylor’s work is driven by allegory and narrative storytelling. Her paintings and stop-motion videos serve as parables for an inner emotional life which she has always considered both grave and glorious. Her indelicate construction of mixed media scenes employ vivid color, varied texture, and distorted scale to intimate significance while pulling images from geology, biology, and an archive of personal photographs. These works elevate complex, but commonplace underlying feelings centered around family, relationships, shame, love, fear (and more) to the realm of the fantastical and the supernatural.

Bio

Kiyomi Taylor was born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey. Her work is heavily influenced by a complex family history, amongst other strong points of interest for her. Taylor’s mother was born in Fukuoka, Japan to the daughter of a wealthy shipping magnate and to the son of an illiterate railroad worker. Her father was born in Poughkeepsie, New York to the daughter of a factory worker who lost his arm – his parents began a forty year, on-and-off romance after meeting in a roller rink in New Jersey at the age of 16. These are kinds of narratives often motivate Taylor to make work about her family. Taylor  lives in New York City where she graduated from NYU in May of 2017 with a BFA in studio art and a concentration in painting. She has shown her work  in and around New York City, including Preservation and Parafiction, a collaborative project involving several of her peers which took place in NYU’s The Commons Gallery.

Kiyomi Taylor’s work was featured in “Systems Flow,” curated by Julia Bozer.